Article(s)
“Last Friday evening in Karachi, Sabeen Mahmud, a forty-year-old Pakistani activist with close-cropped hair, a loud belly laugh, and an interest in human rights, held court at the café she owned. Mahmud opened The Second Floor, a coffee shop and community space, eight years ago, and it became both a staging ground for her activism work and a popular gathering place. It was tucked next to an empty lot on a narrow street, and the moment you entered the skinny front door, you felt you were in a different world. “You’d forget you were in Pakistan,” Mahmud’s friend Sheba Najmi wrote in an e-mail. “It turned strangers into friends.” Bookshelves lined the brick walls of a cozy room, which was dotted with murals. The staircase was painted with blue skies, black crows on telephone lines, and questions such as “Mama, should I trust the government?”
That evening, Mahmud was hosting a panel discussion about the situation in Balochistan, working with several social activists from the embattled province. Balochistan is largely undeveloped and one of Pakistan’s poorest regions, but it’s also the biggest and rich in natural resources. For the last decade, it’s been home to a separatist uprising, the third the province has seen since the nineteen-sixties, and Baloch nationalists have been going missing. Although the numbers are difficult to confirm, as many as twenty-one thousand people may have disappeared. In October of 2013, Mama Qadeer, an activist in his seventies and one of the participants in Mahmud’s event, began marching from Quetta to Islamabad, a distance of five hundred and sixty miles, in order to draw attention to the victims, many of whom, Qadeer alleges, have been “killed and dumped.” His own son’s corpse was found in 2011, two years after he vanished.”
– The New Yorker, The Life and Death of Sabeen Mahmud.
“Sabeen Mahmud, a prominent Pakistani social and human rights activist, has been shot dead, shortly after hosting an event on Balochistan’s “disappeared people”, in the southern city of Karachi, officials have told Al Jazeera.
Mahmud, 40, was the director of T2F [The Second Floor], a café and arts space that has been a mainstay of Karachi’s activists since it opened its doors in 2007. She was one of the country’s most outspoken human rights advocates.
Mahmud was shot four times at close range, with bullets going through her shoulder, chest and abdomen, police told Al Jazeera. She was pronounced dead on arrival at the National Medical Centre hospital at 9.40pm.”
– Al Jazeera, Pakistani rights activist Sabeen Mahmud shot dead.
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World News is a project by David Bernie that uses the medium of posters that promote issues and stories from around the world.
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